The journey to living by design.

Art Assignment 36 Scramble Scrabble Dinner

I love completing art assignments, but this one was a bit of a disaster for me. I’m going to document it anyway because I tried it and the end result was still pretty tasty. Either way, if some of your art assignments haven’t turned out so well, I hope you’ll sympathize.

First, I had trouble finding people to play the word game with me. Most of my friends are teachers and this assignment happened to fall within report card time so everyone was pretty swamped. I had no choice but to use my wifely charms to get Nick to participate with me. It helped that I promised a tasty treat at the end of the game.

Here are our word lists:

In an effort to maintain simplicity (we thought,) we chose this small selection:

So we decided to make grilled nectarines and salted caramel ice cream, topped with toasted almonds. Sounds yummy, right? Yeah, but not so simple once we got started. I headed to the store to pick up the ingredients. So in addition to falling in a busy time, November may not be the best time to plan an art assignment involving fresh produce. I know we are living in a much more global world, but some foods are still mostly seasonal (at least in Canada). I just didn’t realize nectarines were one of them.

These are the only nectarines I could find and they cost me $6.99. Ouch. Well, in the name of art I bought them. I assembled the rest of my ingredients and got ready to cook.

Nick and I headed to the kitchen with a recipe for salted caramel ice cream from David Lebovitz. Now, I should say that I have made a number of Lebovitz’s recipe in the past and they have been amazing. However, this recipe was really complicated. Don’t believe me? Check it out here.

So Nick and I were in the kitchen whipping egg yolks…

and melting sugar.

Looking good so far…

The sugar looks properly melted to me.

And there it is. As soon as the butter hit the pan, the acrid smell of burnt sugar filled the kitchen. We had over-heated the sugar.

The caramel was bitter and frankly, so was I. I felt very discouraged. I thought about starting over but Nick and I were both a bit tired out by round one. I stomped back to the store and picked up something to salvage this art experiment.

So Nick toasted some sliced almonds…

And I grilled the nectarines. I think this was the prettiest part of this whole assignment.

We put it together into this delicious dessert. Sorry for the slightly dark photo but it was getting late by this time.

So that was the end of our crazy cooking experiment. Maybe using store-bought ice cream was a bit of artistic plagiarism, but we ate the evidence so that’s the end of that!